I came home today to find that a carpet cleaning company was steam cleaning the Stompy Girls’ apartment. The smell of cleaning chemicals is pretty obnoxious in my apartment. I can only imagine what it smells like upstairs.
O gross.
And it’s raining. And the temperature is dropping. And that means, we might get more ice. Fun!
I have a splitting headache this morning, bad enough that I’m seriously considering going home. So, of course, my across-the-aisle cube neighbor, who rearranged her cube last week, has decided to put up a clamp light. A 2,000,000,000 watt clamp light. Its blinding evilness is poking me in the eye. Turns out, that’s not the sort of thing that actually helps a headache.
Kill me now.
When I got to work this ayem, the elevator I usually take was being held on another floor by the custodians. Grrr. So I walked across the building to the freight elevator. Someone from another unit, but who works in my department, was coming in the dock door as I was walking down the hallway, toward her. She got to the freight elevator, and I got there just a minute after she did. Just as the door was closing.
WTF?! She saw me. I know she knows who I am, and that I was getting on the elevator, too. There’s absolutely no other reason why anyone would be in that hallway at that time of day. So why couldn’t she hold the door for me? What the hell is wrong with her?
What a lovely way to start the week, no?
Our local cable provider sold out to Comcast. The switchover was at the beginning of January, and seems to have been pretty much a non-issue. Except! Now, I cannot log in to pay my bill online. My last cable bill (which is way overdue), was printed on Insight letterhead. It has my old Insight account number and contact information for, of course, Insight. None of which is valid for Comcast. I tried setting up an online account with Comcast, but their system doesn’t recognize my Insight account number.
WTF? I guess I’ll have to wait until I get home, and call Comcast. I have a very bad feeling that it will involve a voice response system that requires the inputting of an account number that I already know is not valid.
Comcast People, you really shouldn’t make it difficult for me to give you money.
This lens is nowhere near fast enough to catch raindrops, but I gave it a try, anyway.
About the only good thing I can say about the current weather is that the rain might melt the ice off my car. I’m not holding my breath, though, because it’s still below freezing, and my car looks like a giant, blue ice cube.
It’s supposed to start snowing any minute now. Then, the dreaded wintry mix, which they’re threatening will last until tomorrow evening. The snow, I’m fine with. We haven’t had much snow this winter, and I really enjoyed the last one. Ice, though, makes me want to cry.
Space Planning (NOT TO SCALE!)
Or, an hour spent huffing white board markers.
I am terrible at making diagrams, especially when they’re supposed to be to scale. Somehow, though, I was the one who ended up in charge of the white board.
It occurred to me, about half-way through the meeting, that it would be nice if we had a gridded white board. Wouldn’t that be nifty?
As to why we had to have a meeting and white board diagrams, just so we could move a freaking table down the aisle 10 feet, that will forever remain a mystery to me.
I’ve taken photos of the front door handle before, but in the rain, when the blue-green patina doesn’t show up very well.
It’s a beautiful day for wandering around and taking photos. I had to work, though. I ended up leaving a couple of hours early, because I had a headache, which means that even though I’m home, I don’t really feel like tromping around outdoors. Hopefully it’ll be gone soon, because I’d really like to stop at the little graveyard on the edge of town, on my way to my cat sitting job. I planned to stop yesterday, but there were a bunch of AT&T trucks in the parking area, so I didn’t have a place to pull in. Besides, I don’t exactly relish the idea of visiting the dead folks with a bunch of guys from the phone company watching me.
Speaking of cats, I can hear Pandora making her usual muffled wailing noises. Whenever she finds a stray sock or wash cloth, she wanders around the house with it stuffed in her mouth, crying. Over and over and over and over and over and over again. She started doing that about 10 years ago. I haven’t any idea why, except that she’s a mutant freak. It’s kind of funny, when it’s not annoying. Today, it’s not exactly helping my headache.
I mentioned (or maybe not) that I bought a couple of fun toy lenses. Toys, in this case, costing about $100. So they’re expensive for toys, but not for lenses, which can run in the thousands. Anyway, I received them a week or so ago, and one was for the wrong friggin’ camera mount. Grrr. I’ve been trying to email and call the company I ordered from (alas, not the manufacturer, and I’m kicking myself for not ordering directly from them). Bupkis.
They aren’t exactly a fly-by-night company, but I’ve heard complaints that their customer service sucks ass, Mr. Garrison. I’ve ordered from them in the past (a lots42!) with no problem, so apparently it was time that my good luck ran out.
I guess I’ll just return the lens with a copy of the receipt and a polite but irritated letter, and hope for the best, as the lens as it is is of absolutely no use to me.
Alsotoo, this means standing in line at the PO, which is so not my favorite thing to do.
Adorama, you are on my shit list!
I’m tired of ice. I had to scrape it off my car twice today. This morning, it was so thick that I could only chisel off a square inch at a time. Talk about tedious! Then, when I left work this afternoon, it was raining. Raining? Ha! More like semi-frozen gel that hardened on contact with my already-once-scraped car windows.
And to make matters worse, there were three cars lined up behind mine, wanting my parking space. Three of them! What the hell did the second and third driver think they were going to do, arm wrestle the first person in line for my spot? So, I had car scraping performance anxiety, because I knew that all three of them were watching me cussing at me to hurry up.
And now, I’m at home and worrying about potential power outages. Id rather not have a repeat of last spring’s ice storm. Just in case, I’ve got the heat preemptively cranked up. I think I’m going to go put a load of clothes in the washer, check the mail (yay, Netflix!), and park myself in front of the television with a big cup of hot tea.
red paper boat 